Mist and mirrors d’town, El Paso – 6:38:51pm/July 28, 2008
I am supposed to be packing right now. I have a job in another city. It starts in three weeks. I won’t be leaving. This corner, this light, these people, their shadows, have inveighed my life for an adulthood…a long time.
This is where I am. I worked to get here. In the end it’s the only place I trust.
For the last couple of years I was trying to make a stand, to obstruct (or, at least, hopefully, to encourage a dialog of questioning), a plan that would erase this, cleanse it, a plan that would put people with everything in the place of people who really have everything, except, perhaps, a lot of money or overblown homes, far from El Paso’s south side: who in the end are…colonists (look it up).
They can do what they want. Everybody can do what they want. My lucha wasn’t really against…it was one of those things you do on autopilot, like breath, or blink or sleep . This was never a political battle. It was an aesthetic and spiritual one: for me.
For some, it was real estate or ego, intellectual curiosity or mindlessness, ineptness and hubris or the resentment of hubris, and, there was ignorance galore, a massive pissing contest (by world standards…puny).
For now -just for now- there is a quiet in the ‘hood. Chris is back on his corner, the Lydia Patterson kids are hitching rides back to Juarez after school, the politicians have disappeared to where they’re comfortable, the skate kids are crashing off the ramps in Armijo Park, the Koreans are trying to make the best of an economy that only a peso collapse can really destroy. The border is just the border. For now. The people are of the border. Living it. Not playing it like a blueprint. I am prowling again, nearly invisible. The border is just the border. For now, just for now, the developers are invisible, busy with other plans, to the north, that really are more like them, and, the “activists, have gone back to their own pursuits.
Suerte a todo.
This woman, her child, their connection, the shadows of la raza, my prosthetic “eye (the camera and being there),” time, waning summer, sweet sweat and heat, children everywhere, this corner, always mysterious with its light beamed in from the bounce off of the skin of mirrors that sheath the anomaly two blocks away, that building of authority and law that allows no one to look in, but, rather, only to look at themselves off the mirrors, a building a carnival magician would be proud of, this is all there is. Time. Moment. Gesture. Light.
It is mine again, ours again, for now, sometimes of the light and sometimes of shadow. It is sanctuary: sometimes fact and sometimes fiction. Hard edged mist.
There really isn’t anything more than this. Or less.
It just is.
For now.
